The Quarry (3 page)

They didn’t talk for a while. The sun was just past the vertical and it cut hotly into the car. Dust swirled in a sudden complex eddy and faded softly again. The road behind them was
deserted and silent. The man could not imagine he had ever walked on it.

‘I thought we might have a little drink,’ the minister said.

‘A little drink of what?’

The minister gave again that leering smile and reached into the back and took out a bottle of wine that was supposed to be used for communion. He opened it with a corkscrew and took a long
swallow and handed it to the man. The man sipped too.

‘I saw a helicopter this morning,’ said the minister.

‘Oh, yes,’ the man said. He didn’t look interested.

‘A police helicopter.’

‘Yes?’

There was a pause.

‘I saw some police cars on the road too. Maybe they were looking for somebody.’

‘Maybe,’ said the man. He drank from the bottle.

‘Who knows?’

‘Who knows?’ the man said. He gave the bottle back to the minister. He was looking outside the car.

‘But that was a long way back,’ the minister said.

‘Yes.’

A silence fell. The minister leaned towards him and put a hand on his arm.

‘You can talk to me. You can tell me everything.’

‘You do a lot of that, minister? Listening to people confess?’

‘People tell me a lot, yes. It’s part of the job.’

Without looking down, the man took the moist hand from his arm.

The minister was sweating. He emitted again that high, awful laugh and he took the bottle and drank. The hole in front of them went down into the earth and there were striations in the rock that
had been made visible and the two men who were bound together by some intimate and private communion of their own that neither understood although each believed he did and that would kill both of
them in time passed the bottle between them and took sips from it and became gradually drunker as the afternoon went by. They sat with their feet up on the dashboard. Several hours passed in this
way. Then the sun had moved on and the shadows of things were stretching along the ground. In the little white car at the edge of the vast hole the two men had finished the first bottle of wine and
had opened a second one and the minister was smoking a cigarette that sent lines of smoke across his face. A bird flew over the quarry and for an instant its shadow was cast in bizarre
configuration across the scarified ridges of rock, monstrous and segmented and flawed.

The minister put out his cigarette. His eyes were bloodshot. In a hoarse voice, whispering, he said:

‘Why don’t you give up?’

The man looked at him. The minister’s hand was back on his arm now and he could feel its heat.

‘Give yourself up. Whatever you’ve done. They’ll find you. In the end.’

Now the minister’s hand was fumbling across his chest and was plucking at buttons and breath was roaring in his ear. The minister smelled like milk slightly off and his face was distended
on some inner hunger. The man opened his door and got out. He walked to the edge of the quarry. He stood there, looking down. In his arms he carried the second bottle of wine, nearly empty. His
shoulders were shaking badly. His face was bloodless and haggard. He said something inaudible. Then he raised his head and spoke aloud:

‘They’ll get me,’ he said.

Just that. The words were simple and heavy. He looked down again. There were boulders at the bottom of the quarry and trees warped into crazed curious shapes and what appeared to be holes in the
earth. He could see no clear path down and it was a wonder to him how men had ever mined this hole.

The minister got out of the car too. On bowed unsteady legs he came lurching over to where the man was standing. He enfolded him from behind in a slovenly embrace and started tugging at his
buttons again.

The man pulled the fingers from his chest and prised open the arms. He turned.

‘You owe me,’ the minister said.

‘I don’t owe you.’

‘I bought you food. I gave you a lift.’

‘And so?’

The minister looked wildly at him, his face blurred with misery and liquor. ‘All I want,’ he said, ‘all I want… is a little… ’

He didn’t finish.

‘I can’t help you,’ the man said.

The minister’s face sealed whitely like a clam. ‘I could tell them,’ he said. ‘When I get there.’

The man was looking down, into the bottom of the hole. Very flatly, he said: ‘Will you?’

The minister swallowed. He wet his lips with his tongue. ‘No,’ he said.

‘No?’

‘No. I know what it feels like. To be desperate.’

The man smiled, bitterly and privately. He was still looking down.

‘Come on,’ the minister said.

‘All right,’ the man said. He said it softly and was talking to himself but the minister understood him wrongly. He looked at the man and with his hands stretched out stepped forward
to touch him again.

The man was holding the bottle by the neck and he raised it to one side and brought it down with force on the side of the minister’s head. He fell sideways, twitching. The bottle broke in
mid-air where the minister’s head had been and the wine exploded redly, like blood. Or perhaps it was blood. Then the man bent and picked up a rock that had lain untouched here till now and
brought it down on the skull of the man below him and stove it in.

The minister was quite dead then. He lay transfixed by an extremity of stillness and only the dust bore witness to his final convulsion in an etching of scuff-marks and lines. The man
straightened up as if after long labour and put one hand on his back. He looked around. The sun was almost on the horizon and it had cooled into a red coin but of what currency or what value the
man didn’t know and he walked to a log nearby and sat. He bowed his head into his hands again and hunched forward and seemed about to cry. But he didn’t cry.

The landscape around him was lit in a strange unearthly glow and the sky had the quality of metal cooling.

From far back on the dust road there came the sound of an engine. It drew gradually closer. He took the minister under the arms and started to drag him backwards on the ground. He was heavy. His
heels bounced. He pulled him behind a termite hill that rose with stalagmitic elegance towards nothing and propped him up like a doll.

The motorbike went past without slowing. The man was also crouched down behind the termite hill, but he could see a flash of red in passing and a leaning figure poised above it. He straightened
up. The motorbike went over the rise ahead and the noise of the engine faded. Its dust hung thickly over the road, drifting. He bent down and took the minister under the arms again and dragged
him.

He went to the edge of the quarry. A rock slide had made a treacherous slope here and he began to go down. It wasn’t possible any more to drag the minister behind him and he gathered him
up to his chest and tried to walk sideways, stepping from stone to stone. A rock turned underfoot and he collapsed backwards suddenly, grazing his shoulder. He cursed and struggled upright again,
wrestling with the minister. He was staggering downward, downward.

He came to the bottom of the slope. He was covered with sweat by now, and shivering, and weeping a little. He laid the minister down gently across a stone and ran a little way to one side to see
how to go on. He made out a vague track that ran like a weal down this side of the quarry and like a man possessed ran back to his charge and dragged him again.

His arms hurt. He followed the track but after a while he couldn’t go on. The track disappeared down a vertical face and he stood at the top of this drop and looked out. There was no way
to do it except by jumping from one boulder to another but he couldn’t jump with the minister on his back. He sat down to think about this. Then there didn’t seem another way and with a
sort of appalled despair he hauled the body to the edge and dropped it.

It plunged in a white rush and vanished. He heard the sound as it landed. He followed by jumping from one rock to another. He came to the last rock and slid down on his back. He walked down a
bank overgrown with weeds. He went through a narrow defile and emerged into a subterranean garden. It was dank and cool here, profuse with random growth. He stood for a while, just breathing.

He was at the bottom of the quarry. He looked up at the brink on which he had been standing half an hour before. Now he was here. The body of the minister lay nearby. He went to it. It had marks
and contusions from its fall. He rolled it over and began to undress it. It was a curious task. Shoes socks pants shirt underpants vest: he took them off and folded them into a pile and stacked
them neatly close by. The minister was gross in his nudity and lay bared there like some vast, fantastic slug.

The man went away from him and started to look for a place to put him. There were shallow depressions and holes but nothing that resembled a grave. Then he found a deep hole. It went down into
the ground and there were stones lying scattered at the bottom.

He went back to the minister. For the last time he dragged him by the arms. He took him to the edge of the hole and tipped him. He fell and lay there, stiffening. The man jumped down next to
him. He covered the body with rocks. It took a long time and his arms were weak and it was getting dark by the time he was finished. The first stars were showing overhead.

He climbed out of the hole again and stood there, looking down. He was breathing heavily and sweating. The rocks were piled in a pyramidal shape as if they were paying homage to something. He
walked twice around the hole, but it was too dark to see properly.

Less than an hour had passed since he had swung the bottle. Now as he stood here he experienced time flowing backwards from this moment to that as an attenuated continuum that couldn’t be
measured and it seemed absolutely possible that a day or a year or years had gone by. His hands were shaking again. He turned and walked back through the underground garden. Across the cliff-face
at the western side of the quarry there was a vine growing. It had dark-green prolific leaves and there were blue flowers on it that gave off a scent. He picked one.

He started to climb back out of the quarry. He couldn’t remember any more how he’d come down and it was too dark now to see properly. When he’d gone a little way he remembered
the minister’s clothes. He swore. He went back down and got them and began climbing again.

It was full night now. A cold wind was blowing in from the sea and he could smell salt on the air. He emerged from the quarry at a point almost opposite where he’d started and he had to
walk back along the edge, stumbling and lurching in hollows. The sound of frogs came up out of the hole, magnified and quavering on stone. He couldn’t balance himself. His head was hurting
and the muscles in his legs and arms felt powerless and lame. He got to the car. It stood there, glimmering whitely in the dark, both the front doors open.

He went to the car. He took out the black robe. He put it on over his clothes. It was meant for somebody much shorter but fatter than him, so that the length was approximately correct. He
unpicked the hems and in a scattering of fine thread added several millimetres to it. He walked in it, looking down at himself in the weak glow of the headlamps. He wasn’t laughable. He was
haggard and mad and remarkable. He spoke the name of the minister aloud. He paced around, wearing the blue flower in his hair, the wind coming up and the grass hissing.

He took the cassock off again and threw it into the back and got into the car. The seat had been moulded to the contours of a different body and it felt strange underneath him. The key was in
the ignition with a metal loop hanging from it from which depended in turn three other keys to doors he would never go through.

He sat for a while behind the wheel, breathing fast. The first bottle emptied of its contents lay spent and transparent at his feet. There was a film of dust on everything in the car as though
it had been standing there for years. He stared ahead through the windscreen. There were the corpses of beetles shattered on the glass and their legs and feelers were composed in attitudes of
violent expiry.

It didn’t take long to reach the town. On the far side of the rise beyond the quarry the road flattened out again and then swung inland and bent sharply left towards the
sea. A railway track appeared next to the road. At first he couldn’t see anything. Then a dim scattering of lights appeared in front of him and there were buildings against the sky.

He pulled over at the edge of the road and again got out of the car. He stood there, looking. There was a road sign leaning nearby with three neat bullet holes punched through it. A piece of
newspaper tumbled past in the wind. The town was like a ghostly carnival in the distance and he stared at it for a while. Then he got back into the car and put it in gear and drove on.

The town was small and dispersed and ugly. A barrenness of concrete prevailed. The main streets had been tarred long ago but the side-streets were made from gravel. Nothing was taller than one
storey. He passed a café, a butchery, a hair salon. Then he was up against the sea. A metal boom stopped him from driving any further and down the length of a rotting wooden quay he saw the
massive shifting outlines of fishing boats at berth. He turned around. He had driven the length of the town and he hadn’t seen a single other person.

He parked outside the café. At the till inside there was an overweight man, chewing gum, leaning with one elbow on a dirty fridge. The man nodded to him. There was no response.

‘I was looking for the church,’ he said.

The man behind the till pointed. He went out. He drove again through the deserted streets with their intermittent spectral lamps burning. It was nine o’clock in the evening.

At a cross-roads he came to the church. It was made of wood and brick and had been newly painted white and its steeple rose tapering on the sky. He parked outside and got out. The doors were
closed and there was no light inside. He walked behind the building and there was a large house there and voices came from inside. The door was stencilled out in light.